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In spite of his denials, Scott Walker has been captured in a documentary video referring to “divide and conquer” in the treatment of workers – both public and private sector unions.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story this evening, and a storm is now swirling after Walker has repeatedly denied pursuing right to work legislation – something specifically referred to in the conversation with Diane Hendricks, Beloit billionaire who donated $250,000 within one month of Act 10 passage, and $510,000 during the current recall campaign.

The video raises question of fraud in the introduction of the “Budget Repair Bill” as a fiscal issue – Walker’s conversation clearly shows that it is a policy decision – the “divide and conquer” approach to break unions.

Walker’s cheerleaders in Milwaukee right-wing talk radio have been twisting themselves into pretzels trying to spin this into something innocent. And due to the confirmation bias of their audience, they will succeed in making it a non-issue for potential Walker voters if we don’t stop them and expose them.

For example, Belling briefly mentioned it Friday (he had to, it’s the elephant in the living room), but he conveniently ignored the context of what Walker meant by “divide and conquer”, preferring to distract by whining about the term “union busting” that a reporter used in describing Walker’s comments. To whitewash and excuse what Walker was saying, Belling desperately spins it with “I think the unions ARE divided”, and Walker considers “private sector unions his partners”.
So we need to ask: Ok, if they’re his partners then why would he want to “conquer” them?!?

Another way they deflect this is with the lame “yeah, but Obama’s using divide-and-conquer too, it’s an old Saul Alinsky tactic.”

So I googled “divide and conquer saul alinsky” to see if Alinsky ever actually advised this. The only results that came up were a bunch of right-wing sites claiming this was an Alinsky method.
Did Alinsky ever actually recommend “divide and conquer”? It seems highly out of character.